"You can't fix it. You can't make it go away.
I don't know what you're going to do about it,
But I know what I'm going to do about it. I'm just
going to walk away from it. Maybe
A small part of it will die if I'm not around
feeding it anymore."
--Lew Welch

Discontinued a couple of "luxury" expenses, including belonging to Ukulele Underground. Wonderful group! But I'm not using the resources enough. Tightening the belt for winter.

Expect a very stressful day as H prepares to leave tomorrow. Her packing anxiety will be major.

Bought week of online access from other carrier just to do necessary chores without driving to hotspot. Only good for one device, no other hardware online. New modem due Tuesday.

Actually, alone, I might go this route. Sports not as interesting to me as it once was ... character of jocks different, corporate bullshit everywhere. Leisure could use downsizing, too.

No present energy to return to novel project. May change. No further idea about Ukulele man. May be done or inactive for a while.

The 6-day wonder sitting well. Damn good work ... deserves fine tuning in rehearsal. Not counting on it. If nothing happening by summer, will put together book. Probably my last hurrah. I've said that before.

I do look forward to two weeks without stress of H's crises. Though she can get in trouble east as well as here ... ah me. Maybe it never ends.

Wednesday, November 25, 2015

No plans tomorrow ... I'd like to hang out, reflect, give thanks, maybe a movie, maybe turkey somewhere not requiring reservations ... but how the day goes depends on how H goes ... I can't predict that. But a mellow day would be so nice!

Tuesday, November 24, 2015

As you requested, we have cancelled your "orelitrev"
account. As of today, all Web site files and e-mail addresses
associated with the account have been taken offline and no
further charges will be processed."

The archive is now managed by the Eng Dept at PSU. Direct questions to them.

My best Thanksgivings were from the mid 1960s to mid 1970s, when the Deemers, the Crooks, the Bradleys, the Fuquas and the Richardsons would gather at an alternating host household. These were 3 day affairs with great food and drink, great homemade music, and non stop laughter. Incredible celebration of friendship! I was the hub, Crooks and Richardson were Army buddies, Bradley and Fuqua I met at the Ash Grove, fellow folk musicians. Man, could we throw a feast!

Still glowing with an appreciation of good manners in drama profession: thanks for sending this, look forward to reading it! Almost never get this courtesy in the film industry unless at small powerless indie level. Power embraces rudeness, I suppose.

What will I be writing next, if anything? A return to Dancing on the Titanic (an image used in the play)? Reworking another old play? Something new?

I thought you might like this story from The Washington Post.
Republicans need to stand up to Trump’s bullyinghttp://wapo.st/1MNU1nU

"Just in the past few days, Mr. Trump has repeated the lie that President Obama intends to admit 200,000 Syrian refugees; the correct number is 10,000. He spreads the lie that thousands of American Muslims openly celebrated the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center; in fact, there were no such celebrations. He tweeted a false statistic that blacks are responsible for 81 percent of murders of white victims; in fact, 82 percent of whites are killed by whites."

I thought you might like this story from The Washington Post.
Attacks on American Muslims are growing uglier by the day. It must stop.http://wapo.st/1P4Kq1P

"Why are we degenerating so quickly and so far from our country’s founding values? Because it’s an election year. And political leaders — egged on by the grandstanding and lies of Donald Trump — are peddling fear like it’s a miracle drug.

In communities across America, we are turning on each other, on the very neighbors who have been part of the fabric of our country for decades."

...I am a novelist. Every year, I spend a great deal of my time giving readings or lectures at which, almost unfailingly, I am asked about Islam and Muslims and the wars now consuming the Middle East. I try to explain and contextualize, to remind people about history and politics, to bring some art and culture into the mix. But every couple of months, when another terrorist attack happens, the work I do seems to be for nothing. What chance does someone like me have when compared with the power of well-funded networks? The beheadings, the crucifixions, the destruction of cultural heritage that ISIS practices—none of these are new. They all happened, and continue to happen, in Saudi Arabia as well.

This year, the government of Saudi Arabia has beheaded more people than ISIS. It persecutes Shiites and atheists. It has slowly destroyed sites of cultural and religious significance around Mecca and Medina. To almost universal indifference, it has been bombing Yemen for seven months. Yet whenever terror strikes, it escapes notice and evades responsibility. In this, it is aided and abetted by Western governments, who buy oil from tyrants and sell them weapons, while paying lip service to human rights. I have no patience anymore for people who claim that Muslims do not speak out. They do, every day. Muslims are the primary victims of ISIS, and its primary resisters. It is an insult to every one of the hundreds of thousands of Muslim victims of terrorism to lump them with the lunatics who commit terror.

The truth is that ISIS unleashes its nihilistic violence on anyone—Muslim, Christian, or Jew; believer or unbeliever—who doesn’t subscribe to its cult. I wish I could do something for the victims of terrorist violence. But I am a writer; words are all I have. And all I know is that I want, with all my heart, to preserve and celebrate what ISIS wishes to destroy: a multiethnic, multireligious, multicultural life.

Laila Lalami is the author, most recently, of The Moor’s Account , a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. She is a professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside. ■

Marveling at the good timing of my professional life ... beginning my writing career when the arts were not slaves to the marketplace and grants were numerous ... then when the pendulum began to swing in the 1990s, suggesting a new financial challenge, the phone rang and Portland State's Eng Dept invited me to start a screenwriting program. Perfect timing! and two decades of $tability. Amazing good luck.

Today I hope to do absolutely nothing. Past 3 weeks exhausting! Wrote a new play and rewrote a 20 year old play. Both off on first searches for a life. Ace in the hole, both will be published eventually at RBP, says the publisher.

But another round of good luck to wrap up a career would be sweet. So would a sane world. Crapshoots, both.

Monday, November 16, 2015

After I rework the old play, I think I need to go back to a snail's pace. I no longer have the mental or physical stamina for this. Existential marathons are for younger folks. The 6-day play wiped me out.

Thursday, November 12, 2015

Summer, 1959, 19 years old, listening to the very same Gerry Mulligan album I'm listening to now at 76; in Berkeley, a transfer to Cal from Cal Tech but a dropout in less than a term; in the Army in a few months, in the Security Agency because the recruiter had a quota to fill, from boot camp to Monterey's Army Language School, to Germany as a Russian linguist, top secret codeword clearance, hanging out with, drinking with, Ivy League wannabe writers, get turned on to literature ... And the rest is etc etc etc.

"“The Internet has become a conspiracy to get people to consume,” said the computer programmer Kyle Drake, who — with anthropologist Amber Case — just wrapped a sold-out two-day conference on the glories of the early Web. “There’s a shift from creation to consumption … Frankly, it’s become oppressive.”"

For me the downside of writing (serious inside-out writing, not commercial outside-in) are the physical and mental fatique that result, more acute the older I get. Writing becomes an existential marathon, after which one collapses.

A week or two of grunt work, getting an old script into new software. Cut and paste didn't retain a lot of format. Fix before I rewrite, which itself will be challenging, given the monumental change I have in mind.

Harriet looking for an art class to take, a schedule to follow. Trouble motivating herself. I never had that problem!

Dorothy Parker wrote she hates writing but loves having written. I am the opposite. I love writing! Nothing that happens later matches the high, the joy, of the present tense process of writing. The older I get, the more this is true.

Still tinkering but it's time to stop. Time to send it off. Wed. or Thur., after a final read and whatever feedback comes before then. Later feedback processed for later development. Not sbout to mess with big things at this stsge. Comes later if at all.

Then focus on FAMILY VALUES, new title for old script I am reworking. Major revision of major character.

The poisoning of Dungeness crab off the California coast by a mysterious algae bloom may be bad news for the seafood industry, but to marine biologists and climate scientists, it is a frightening omen of future distress to a vibrant ecosystem. Experts say the toxin in the algae, which likely flourished in this year's record-high ocean temperatures, is one symptom of a wholesale shift in the physical and biological makeup of the Pacific Ocean - a transformation so abrupt and merciless that it is endangering species and forcing migrations before our eyes.

"We've never had this in my career down here, and I've been fishing crabs since '86," said Larry Collins, president of both the Crab Boat Owners Association and the San Francisco Community Fishing Association. He noted that water temperatures measured 61 degrees Thursday when they should have been about 54.

The trouble with experience, you find out how things like dramatic competitions really work. Writing a good, even great, play is not the ticket. It's having the right script in front of the right decision makers at the right time. Most of those parameters are out of your control. It's a crapshoot.

In Boise we met a guy in the park who said we was spending thousands a month to keep his dog, his best friend, alive. After paying for some of Sketch's tests, I believe it! But we don't have thousands ... So we'll see what happens.

Everybody's doing better today, which is great. I'm jacked because 2 of the
4 feedbacks so far say "it's a winner" and all feedback has been helpful, the new draft already significantly stronger. Maybe I can get it out of the house next week.

Monday, November 2, 2015

Our doc freaked by severity of dog bite ... Let's put this dangerous dog to sleep, oops, belongs to daughter, H refuses to file complaint. Meanwhile when I wasn't looking, took pain pills without food, sick in doc office. And just to make life interesting, Sketch (90s in human yrs) having symptoms of major decline, may not last the year. So why am I smiling? Because the gods of theater gave me a great gift!

Sunday, November 1, 2015

I let H read the draft, a mistake. She doesn't respond to the darker areas of lit, which is where I am most of the time. When push comes to shove, this is not a feel good play. But letting her read it was better than putting up with the consequences of not. I wish she had forgotten I was writing it ha ha.

Taking the dog out into a damp fall morning, felt filled with blessings, a new play of some worth presented to me on my birthday by the theater gods, a guarded optimism it will find a home with its topical subject matter, its professional delivery, its engaging story, its rich characters, with perfect timing to realize local opportunity, serendipity, and many national opportunities, someone, somewhere, will embrace this play.

Earlier blog (archived)

ENTERTAINMENTS

Career Support

"Charles' impact on Northwest literature and theater over the past twenty-plus years is impressive. As a critic I've followed his work since the early 1980s, and no playwright has had such an important or long-lasting effect on this community's cultural life." --Bob Hicks, Senior Critic (retired), The Oregonian

"During the years we've worked together, I feel Charles was the clearest and most important theatre voice in Oregon." --Steve Smith, Artistic Director (retired), Theatre Workshop

"This play has balls!" -- Anonymous young man, shouting in the dark before curtain call for Country Northwestern.

2006
Finalist, Mystery of the Year (Foreword Magazine), for Dead Body In A Small Room.

2007
Begin making digital films. Deconstructing Sally, perhaps the best of the bunch ("Deconstructing Sally has voice: It’s a good example of how skillful and individualistic democratic filmmaking can be.")

2008Changing Key, a video hyperdrama and lecture-demonstration presented to national hypertext conference.